Emperor Maximilian I was intensely engaged with material relics of the ancient Roman and medieval German past. Maximilian’s historical imagination, creative and participatory rather than objective and distancing, guided his own monumental projects. This essay analyzes, among other episodes, the quest for the bones of the historical Siegfried in Worms and an apparently archeological drawing by Albrecht Dürer.

This essay proposes a new reading of the famous passage comparing the devotional value of Flemish and Italian painting in Francisco de Holanda’s (1517-84) Portuguese treatise Da pintura antigua. My purpose is to demonstrate that the polarizing and divisive claims made about Flemish painting are unmade in the text itself. The major grounds upon which Flemish art is attacked in the first of the four Roman dialogues are upheld for admiration in the second. The strongly misogynistic character of the passage on Flemish painting has obscured the more complex and shifting treatment of gender identity in the text.

This article examines a central narrative and ethical motif of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene —the golden chain —in the context of Spenser’s broader debts to Homeric epic. While largely neglected in favor of more immediate sources, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is profoundly felt in Spenser’s mythography of strife. In its representation of the consequences of cosmological and spiritual strife, The Faerie Queene realizes the classical and late antique allegorical tradition of interpreting Homeric epic as illustrative of the doctrines of pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Empedocles. Its moral landscape structured according to the oppositional yet complementary forces of love and strife, Spenser’s epic enacts the Homeric-Empedoclean epic of the allegorists so as to offer its own etiology of discord, one sympathetic with, but also distinct from, that of Homer.